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Andrew H. Knoll

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Andrew Knoll
Born (1951-04-23) April 23, 1951 (age 73)
West Reading, Pennsylvania
OccupationBotanist Edit this on Wikidata
Awards
Scientific career
ThesisStudies in Archean and early Proterozoic paleontology (1977)
Websiteeps.harvard.edu/people/andrew-h-knoll

Andrew Herbert Knoll (born 1951) is the Fisher Research Professor of Natural History[1] and a Research Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences[2] at Harvard University.[2][3] Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Andrew Knoll graduated from Lehigh University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973[2][3] and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977[3] for a dissertation titled "Studies in Archean and Early Proterozoic Paleontology."[2] Knoll taught at Oberlin College for five years before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1982.[2] At Harvard, he serves in the departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Earth and Planetary Sciences.[1][2]

Scientific work

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Andrew Knoll is best known for his contributions to Precambrian paleontology and biogeochemistry. He has discovered microfossil records of early life in Spitsbergen, East Greenland, Siberia, China, Namibia, western North America, and Australia,[1] and was among the first to apply principles of taphonomy and paleoecology to their interpretation. He has also elucidated early records of skeletonized animals in Namibia and remarkable fossils of the Ediacaran Doushantuo Formation, China, preserved in exceptional cellular detail by early diagenetic phosphate precipitation. Knoll and colleagues authored the first paper to demonstrate strong stratigraphic variation in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates and organic matter preserved in Neoproterozoic (1000–539 million years ago) sedimentary rocks, and Knoll's group also demonstrated that mid-Proterozoic carbonates display little isotopic variation through time, in contrast to both older and younger successions.

Knoll has longstanding interests in biomineralization, paleobotany, plankton evolution, and mass extinction.[1][2] Among other things, Knoll and his colleagues were the first to hypothesize that rapid build-up of carbon dioxide played a key role in end-Permian mass extinction, 252 million years ago. More generally, Knoll uses physiology as a conceptual bridge to integrate geochemical records of environmental change with paleontological records of biological history. He has also served as a member of the science team for NASA's MER rover mission to Mars.[4]

Honors include membership in the US National Academy of Sciences,[5] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[6] the American Philosophical Society,[7] the American Academy of Microbiology, and Foreign Membership in the Royal Society of London and the National Academy of Sciences, India, as well as the Paleontological Society Medal, the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society (London), the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Oparin Medal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, the Sven Berggren Prize of the Royal Physiographic Society, Sweden, the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America, and both the Walcott and Thompson medals of the US National Academy of Sciences. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for "Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth". In 2018, Knoll received the International Prize for Biology, conferred in Tokyo in the presence of the Emperor and Empress of Japan. In 2022, he received the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences.

Books

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  • 2004 – Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 277 pp., ISBN 978-0-691-12029-4
  • 2007 – The Evolution of Primary Producers in the Sea. Falkowski, P. and A.H. Knoll, Eds. Elsevier, Burlington MA, 441 pp., ISBN 978-0-12-370518-1
  • 2012 – Fundamentals of Geobiology. Knoll, A.H., D.E. Canfield and K. Konhauser, Eds. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester UK, 443 pp., ISBN 978-1-4051-8752-7
  • 2013 – Biology: How Life Works. Morris, J., D. Hartl, A.H. Knoll, R. Lue, and others. Macmillan. 2nd Edition 2016: ISBN 978-1-319-06779-3; 4th Edition 2022.
  • 2021 – A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. Knoll, A.H. Custom House, New York NY, 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-06-285391-2

Selected papers

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Honors

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d "Andrew H. Knoll – Faculty – OEB – Harvard University". Archived from the original on 2013-07-26. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g "Andrew H. Knoll".
  3. ^ a b c "Andrew H. Knoll – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". Archived from the original on 2013-07-08.
  4. ^ "Biodiversity: Interview with Andrew Knoll Part I". www.astrobio.net. Archived from the original on 2011-04-08.
  5. ^ "Andrew H. Knoll". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2021-12-09.
  6. ^ "Andrew Herbert Knoll". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2021-12-09.
  7. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-12-09.
  8. ^ "Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 13 May 2011. Retrieved 14 February 2011.
  9. ^ "University to bestow seven honorary degrees at 519th Convocation". May 27, 2014. Archived from the original on 2015-03-16. Retrieved 2015-04-05.
  10. ^ "Andrew Knoll | Royal Society".
  11. ^ Crafoord Prize 2022
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